1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an information technology (IT) environment, and more in particularly, to reducing chargeback costs in an IT environment.
2. Background Information
With increasing automation of business processes within enterprises, the demand for information technology (IT) infrastructure is increasing exponentially, and is now a significant percentage of the total operating cost of a business. The capacity, performance, and availability demands of individual departments within each enterprise are being consolidated from isolated server-storage silos, to a unified virtualized environment of servers hosting multiple on-demand virtual machines, with transparent access to the entire storage subsystem using storage area networks (SANs). While such consolidation helps management, it poses challenges for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) responsible for containing IT costs and regulating usage of the infrastructure within departments. Chargeback is a process used to regulate IT costs by charging each department proportionally according to the resource allocated to it. This fosters efficient use of the available resources and also makes departments aware of their IT usage and associated costs.
A typical enterprise environment includes multiple departments, each utilizing custom IT applications and IT resource services. With the advancement of technologies such as virtualization and multi-core architectures, such IT custom applications and resource services are deployed in a shared and consolidated server-storage environment, typically managed by the enterprise IT department. Resource allocation for the applications is provided either by humans or resource planners. One example of resource allocation planner is TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC) Storage Area Network (SAN) Planner. The allocation technique is dependent on the application Service Level Objectives (SLO), defined in terms of maximum latency, minimum throughput, etc. The allocation technique may also depend on quality attributes including no single point of failure, disaster recovery support, etc. Capacity planning involves utilizing automated tools to allocate a set of resources for a given set of SLOs. This is accomplished in two broad steps: first, the resources needed to achieve SLOs of each customer are determined using workload and device models (e.g., queuing theory model) and second, the resources are allocated from available resources using one of the many multi-dimensional bin packing algorithms. An IT department keeps track of the usage of these resources and depending on their usage allocates costs to each department in the form of a chargeback.
Depending on the chargeback policies, departments may be charged, whether or not they use the resources allocated to them. Although an IT department recovers total operating cost in the form of chargeback, enterprise as a whole may suffer due to the opportunity cost associated with the unused resources. System administrators or IT service providers while performing resource allocations attempt to achieve one or more of the following goals: satisfy customers SLOs, optimize the overall utilization of the resources, accommodate as many customers as possible, maximize profits and reduce operational costs. Because in general, IT customers and providers are conservative, and resources are over-provisioned to handle peak loads. This translates to misuse of resources and higher chargeback for customers.